1997
The Hidden Attributes Table

Baron Services' StormScan® made NIDS attributes available to broadcast meteorologists.

Embedded in the NEXRAD Composite Reflectivity product was a "Combined Attribute Table" which listed, among other things, each identified storm, it's centroid, direction, speed, and whether a mesocyclone or Tornado Vortex Signature was associated.  The table was never intended, and is still not intended for tracking tornadoes.  In fact, the NWS never intended to make the table available.  But there was still value to the TV met as far as situational awareness was concerned, so long as the user remembered that only the centroid, not the tornado was being plotted, and that the information was over five minutes old when received, 10 minutes old before the next Attributes arrived.   We were the first to "discover" this imbedded table; to plot the centroid of each storm, and using the direction and speed attribute, plot an arrow depicting where the centroid would be over time.  One could click on the resulting SCIT (Storm Cell Identification and Tracking) and produce a storm track.  This Automated Storm Tracking through use of  Storm Attributes became the basis for several Baron patents.

Our  Automated Attribute Storm Tracking, attempted to account for the 5 minute delay in the estimated time of arrival at communities by assuming the storm was 5 minutes further down the storm track and adjusting the storm track accordingly.  Shifting the storm track to the center of rotation required manual input.  We made it as quick and easy as possible with a one click solution and suggested the process be Standard Operating Procedure. 

We have moved on to far better means of tracking storms as will be discussed below, but unfortunately all competing automated storm tracking is attributes based and therefore extremely inaccurate and misleading, made even more inaccurate in some cases by efforts to work around our patents.